The article is not correct. Perplexity has its own crawler and crawls sites directly.
The nice thing about Perplexity is its source annotation. It will show you in real time how it's arriving at its data capture(s), and then annotate the results accordingly.
It really is a lovely service. It has replaced the "normal" search engine for me, for most of my queries. And has completely replaced ChatGPT/Claude as it can fulfill those needs directly (and even let me choose to use one of those models).